Our bittersweet paradise

Last updated at 10:02 19 July 2006

When Oxford-educated young actor James Chatto and his wife Wendy left London in 1982 to live on the Greek island of Corfu, they thought they had found the perfect family idyll. But the death of their younger son, Ford - known in the family as Nibby - from leukaemia was to shatter their dream. Here James, now 50 and a successful writer, tells Femail how, 20 years after Nibby's death, he has felt able to return to the island.

The memory of the young Greek doctor's words still makes me want to weep: "Your son is simply being naughty, Mr Chatto. What he needs is a good smack." But at the time I just felt angry, knowing at once that he was wrong, and feeling not in the slightest bit reassured by his unfeeling diagnosis.

I would not have dreamed of hitting my little son, Nibby, then 16 months, under any circumstances - least of all when he appeared to be seriously unwell. I was more used to him

shouting for joy as he ran across our garden, playing in the shadow of the olive trees where, just a few months earlier, he had taken his first steps. Yet the night before we rushed him to the doctor, something disturbing had happened.

Nibby had been sitting on the rug playing with his toys. I had called him to come and have his bath. He toddled across the floor, smiling. But in the doorway he had suddenly sat down heavily and started to whimper. I stood him up, but his legs seemed to have no strength in them.

He seemed pale and totally uninterested in his surroundings. I hated to see him looking like this, so unlike his usual self. Like every parent, I dreaded the thought there might be anything seriously wrong with my child.

For the very first time I questioned the wisdom of having brought my family to live on the island of Corfu.

Since leaving London in 1982, we had, for three-and-a-half years, lived what seemed the most idyllic existence I could have imagined.

Having left behind a successful acting career, I was writing short stories, supplementing my small income by bartering food with villagers, exchanging bread I had baked in return for fish and eggs, while my wife Wendy looked after our two small sons, Joe, three-and-a-half, and Nibby, whose real name was Ford.

The two brothers adored each other so much they could hardly bear to be apart. But Nibby's sudden illness was a wake-up call that we might have a medical emergency on our hands, and that what my son needed was not a small village clinic, but urgent access to the latest medical technology.

Something was definitely wrong with Nibby, and having no confidence in the diagnosis we had been given, I was not prepared to stand by and see my little boy suffering.

That afternoon, as Nibby's temperature started to rise, Wendy and I put both boys into the car and drove to the hospital in Corfu Town.

There, in the emergency clinic, a woman doctor gave our son a lumbar puncture, removing a sample of the fluid from his spine to test for meningitis. We knew she had done this because a young child had recently died on the island from this illness. I squeezed Wendy's hand as Nibby cried, trying to reassure her. But inwardly I was just as afraid.

The doctor told us she could not do anything more until she received the results back in two days. In the meantime, she advised us to try to bring Nibby's temperature down by 'giving him a cold shower'.

Wendy and I had always agreed that if any of us fell seriously ill, we would fly straight back to Britain. I called my mother in London and booked Nibby and I on a flight the following morning.

I knew how hard it must be for Wendy to say goodbye to us, and promised her I would call the moment I knew what was wrong with our son. Nibby's fever was down as we boarded the plane, and he sat quietly on my lap. I felt so full of love for him and so protective that I silently promised myself I would do whatever it took to make him well again.

Cradling him in my arms after he fell asleep, I longed to return to our previous carefree existence.

When Wendy and I had decided to move to Corfu, I was a struggling young actor. Having just finished playing the role of Annus (and understudying Pontius Pilate) in Jesus Christ Superstar, I felt it was a good time to move abroad and start working on a writing career.

My flat in South London was tiny, and knowing we could not afford to buy anywhere bigger we reasoned that we might have a better life if we lived abroad for a while.

After visiting a tiny village called Loutses while on holiday, we had returned to buy a house there. It cost £6,000 and consisted of two small buildings and a patch of land.

Friends and family thought we were mad. But we convinced ourselves and them that this was the best time to take on such a project - while we were young and full of enthusiasm.

When we arrived on Corfu, Wendy took on the problems of primitive plumbing, heating and damp and did her best to make the house habitable.

We were dependent on my tiny income - at first as little as £50 a month - from writing short stories, but in spite of all these hardships, neither Wendy nor I ever considered returning to London - this was a life we both passionately wanted.

But now, if Nibby was really ill, all that had changed. Being cut off from modern medicine seemed frightening, the delights of the island paling in comparison to our fears for our son.

I met my anxious mother at Heathrow, and she took us straight to her house where her private doctor was waiting to examine Nibby.

Without giving a diagnosis, he referred Nibby to a specialist the following morning at Westminster Children's Hospital, where after Nibby had undergone a series of tests and further examinations, he was admitted overnight until the results became available. But we did not have to wait long.

That evening, a young doctor took me into a private office where a sister and a registrar were waiting. I cannot remember what words he used. My mind has blanked it out. But somehow I walked out of that room with the knowledge that my baby son had leukaemia, later confirmed as acute lymphoblastic rather than the slightly less deadly myeloid.

Nibby, I was told, had a 12.5 per cent chance of survival. I felt absolutely terrified as I struggled to take in this awful diagnosis.

Clinging to the one hope I had been given - that Nibby did have a chance of survival - I wondered desperately how I would break the news to Wendy.

In the end, I called her from the hospital and blurted out "It's leukaemia", and stood there in the sterile hallway feeling helpless as I listened to her sobbing down the line.

When she could at last speak properly, we arranged that she and Joe would fly to London to join me the following day.

The medical staff allowed me to sleep with Nibby that night, though neither of us slept much.

A young cancer specialist lingered by the bedside explaining what Nibby's treatment would involve - six months in hospital, followed by a further two years as an outpatient. More immediately, he would have an intravenous line inserted into his chest so that chemotherapy could begin straight away.

After the doctor had left, I watched Nibby sleeping, wondering how I would ever explain to him why his idyllic life on Corfu, growing up with his brother, was about to be swopped for the grim sterility of a hospital ward.

When Wendy arrived the next day, we agreed that one of us would always remain at our son's side, Wendy by day before I took over each night.

All thoughts of writing went out of my head, my son being the sole focus of my attention. Both Wendy's family and mine offered to help us financially until Nibby was well again.

So our vigil began, my wife and I splitting out time between keeping Joe entertained during the day and sitting by his younger brother's bed at night. Trying to remain optimistic was hard, especially as the chemo was not working.

Wendy and I found ourselves becoming irritable with one another from tiredness and emotional exhaustion. Nibby lay watching us arguing, making the little kissing sound that meant he wanted a cuddle. Only later did I guess he probably wanted to see Wendy and I cuddling each other, too.

By May, just a month after he had first become ill, Nibby was growing weaker rather than stronger, and having contracted fungal pneumonia had to be transferred to the intensive care unit.

As his condition rapidly deteriorated, we brought Joe in to visit his brother. Our elder son's eyes were huge and serious - Wendy's and mine full of tears we could scarcely hold back.

Slowly we came to the realisation from the gentle words of the doctors that our son's death was imminent. Wendy asked if we could donate Nibby's organs, but this was not possible because his illness would have damaged his body too much.

Now at last, in this moment of crisis, Wendy and I felt able to talk to one another properly again, both of us terrified of how we would ever be able to cope with such a loss. "Nothing matters more than us as a family," Wendy told me, and I clung to her words with desperation as we took it in turns to stroke Nibby's forehead, talking to him and playing his favourite songs on a cassette player. Nibby looked as if he was sleeping when a male nurse who was checking the monitor and drips suddenly said "Any moment now" very softly.

We asked for the equipment to be disconnected so we could hold our son, and the nurse lifted Nibby off the bed and laid him in Wendy's arms. Kissing and cradling him, she held him as he died.

From the moment Nibby had first become ill, I had never allowed myself to imagine he might die, focusing all my energies for those two months on the thought of his recovery.

Yet despite the chemotherapy, all efforts to save Nibby had failed. Now he was dead, I felt helpless and directionless, yet also determined to remain strong for Wendy and Joe.

London had become associated in our minds with Nibby's illness and death. Utterly numb, we discussed returning to Corfu, and suddenly realised this was what we both very much wanted to do.

Wendy was too distressed to attend Nibby's funeral, remaining at home looking after Joe, while my brother, Daniel, who is now married to Princess Margaret's daughter, Lady Sarah, drove me to Mortlake Crematorium in South-West London.

I took my son's ashes away with me, knowing that at some point Wendy and I would have our own small ceremony at home on Corfu.

Returning to our house on the island was the right decision. The people of Loutses, far more accustomed than the British to the idea of the death of a child, were open to talking about Nibby and warm, welcoming and kind to us.

"Ti na kame?" - "What can one do?" - was their response to our tragedy, which to me suddenly made far more sense than continually asking myself: "Why us?"

I felt more at home here when my emotions were so agonisingly raw than I could ever have done at home in England.

Joe became both our main concern and our only source of comfort. Unable fully to understand what had happened to his brother, he called out at night, waking from sleep convinced we were all about to die. We responded by taking him into our bed, talking through his fears and explaining that Nibby was now in heaven.

There was still work to be done on the house and I was grateful for the distraction from my sometimes overwhelming grief. One peaceful evening Wendy, Joe and I went down into the garden, dug a hole beneath one of the olive trees and buried the small bronze box containing Nibby's ashes.

It was a place where Nibby had been so full of happiness and life, and we wanted him to remain there.

Slowly as the months followed, we tried to cope without Nibby. But it was emotionally exhausting.

Everything reminded us constantly of him.

By the time autumn came we knew we did not want to face the bleakness of a winter there without Nibby. So finally we fastened the shutters and left the house where we had once been so happy.

Two years after Nibby died, we returned once again, with Joe and our one-year-old daughter, Mae, whose birth had brought us unexpected joy in the midst of our grief.

Although the pain of our loss was still there, our memories of Nibby now felt soothing rather than the stabbing pain we had felt before. Although our life was now elsewhere, in Canada where I had established a successful writing career, I knew we would eventually come back to the house in Loutses again.

Now, 20 years since Nibby's death, Joe and Mae are almost as old as Wendy and I were when we discovered the house. Having sold the house to a friend when we left the island, I have bought it back and hope it will become a house for Joe and Mae to take their own families to one day.

But for Wendy and I it will always be home - the place where two young lovers discovered what parenthood, and the pain of loss, really means.